With North Carolina Democrats facing spirited primaries for offices ranging from governor to state auditor, a group of liberal bloggers are playing a key role in the state party's political conversation.

Today, it will take the spotlight in a historic first: An online debate between the two major contenders for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue and state Treasurer Richard Moore.

The two candidates will face off on a Web site called BlueNC, with questions submitted by regular readers and anyone with an Internet connection. Instead of speeches given at podiums, Perdue and Moore will duel with words tapped out on keyboards.

"We're really excited about exploring this new medium," said site co-founder James Protzman. "I expect we'll get some combination of real honest live typing by both candidates and some prepackaged stuff."

The gubernatorial debate is just the latest milestone for the three-year-old Web site.

In 2006, BlueNC promoted Democratic congressional candidate Larry Kissell, who came within a few hundred votes of unseating Republican U.S. Rep. Robin Hayes of Concord despite little support from the party establishment.

Since then, it has become a major stopping point for Democratic candidates trying to reach a progressive audience.

Aside from buying ads on the site, candidates also participate in "live blogs" -- a kind of group interview in which they type answers to readers' questions in a rolling, online conversation.

After a successful live blog with Elizabeth Edwards during a book tour in November 2006, BlueNC became the online equivalent of a county Democratic dinner.

So far this season, lieutenant governor candidates Pat Smathers and Dan Besse; congressional candidates Larry Kissell, Marshall Adame, Jay Ovittore, Roy Carter and John Autry; and a host of statewide candidates have been on the site.

It was during a live blog on BlueNC that U.S. Senate candidate Jim Neal revealed that he is gay, making national news.

A blog is born

In some respects, it was only a matter of time before BlueNC came along.

In recent years, liberals have taken to blogs the way that conservatives once set up shop on talk radio. In most states, they were inspired by their opposition to the Bush administration or the heated 2004 and 2006 elections.

Without highly competitive state campaigns for U.S. Senate, governor or president those years, however, North Carolina's bloggers never took center stage.

Joel Craig Raupe, an administrative assistant to House Republican Leader Paul Stam and occasional blogger on sites such as the N.C. Republican Roundtable, says conservative blogs at the national level took off much earlier than BlueNC did.

That's one reason he thinks there is no statewide conservative equivalent -- no RedNC, if you will: North Carolina's Republicans already get their fill at national sites like Townhall, Redstate and Free Republic.

BlueNC began in late 2005 with two UNC-Chapel Hill law students, Lance McCord and John Livingston, who were interested in starting a blog on national politics similar to the liberal site Crooked Timber, which is written by professors from the United States and abroad.

Friends recommended they talk with Protzman, a Chapel Hill marketing consultant active in Democratic circles. After a flurry of e-mail and a single face-to-face meeting at Symposium Cafe in Research Triangle Park, BlueNC was born.

The key to the site's success is its bottom-up management. Anyone can start a blog on BlueNC, but only a small group of moderators can promote an individual post to the site's front page, where it will be widely seen by casual readers.

McCord and Livingston stopped contributing when their new legal careers got in the way, but Protzman found new editors in some of the site's more dedicated contributors.

Aside from Protzman, the moderators now include Gordon Smith, a family and child therapist in Asheville; Linda Cloud, the head of a child-care related nonprofit in Moore County; Greg Flynn, a Raleigh architect; Betsy Muse, a stay-at-home mother in Monroe; and Robert Peterson, a science researcher in Chapel Hill.

Many of the site's top moderators have never met in person.

In general, the members of the group say they agree on a few basic issues: increasing health-care coverage for the uninsured, changing or scrapping the federal No Child Left Behind law and opposing the proposed Navy landing field in Eastern North Carolina.

But even on those issues, they differ on the details, and when it comes to the candidates they usually agree only that they prefer Democrats to Republicans.

"I think you could have three of us in a room and have four opinions," joked Cloud.

Back to the grassroots

It remains to be seen what effect BlueNC will have on the election.

In a recent week, the site had about 3,500 unique visitors a week, or 26,000 page views, according to Protzman. Ninety percent of visitors are in North Carolina, scattered from the Outer Banks to the mountains, with a small percentage coming from outside the state.

In terms of voters, that's a small slice of the electorate. But many of the readers are the kinds of networkers who influence their friends and acquaintances indirectly, said Democratic political consultant Gary Pearce.

He said that BlueNC and other blogs are reviving the old-fashioned politics that had been killed by the advent of expensive TV ad campaigns.

"Online politics is bringing back the grassroots," said Pearce, who runs a blog called Talking About Politics with Republican consultant Carter Wrenn. "The great thing about it is that anyone with a computer can talk to everybody with a computer."

Jerry Meek, chairman of the state Democratic Party, says the site serves a valuable role as a "think tank" to air ideas. But he does not know how widely read the site is and wonders if it has any more influence than a multitude of other constituencies within the party.

The site is popular with Republicans, whom BlueNC moderators sometimes call "lurkers" because they typically don't comment.

Raupe said he knows a number of GOP lawmakers who keep tabs on BlueNC.

"If Republicans are going to win an election here, they have to get a sizable percentage of the Democratic vote," he said. "That vote isn't necessarily reached on BlueNC, but the people who influence that vote read it."